Christmas 2009

6:30 AM Christmas morning with Lucy, Liberty, Chas, Emma, Katie, Matt and Shelby standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting to see what Santa had left for them.

Flash! We had a very special guest the night before at this years Christmas Eve festivities and as you can see he was well received!

Dave, Lana, Shelby, Matt and Liberty

Great Grandma & Santa

The Avery's

Mike, Laura and a Utah fan.

Grandpa and Grandma and a smiling Santa.

Santa enjoyeed the kids most of all ... especially the true belivers!

Favorite Thinking Spot

I spent yesterday afternoon at my favorite thinking spot in DC - the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Clay was having a particularly hard day yesterday because he learned that he will not be able to come home for Christmas. He was sitting in his room at Camp Pendelton bored and frustrated and in an effort to distract him I took pictures of some of my favorite exhibits and sent them to him and we "talked" over text about each one. I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the pictures. My favorite painting in SAAM is Thomas Moran's HUGE HUGE HUGE painting of the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone (above and for more info http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/index.php?s=saam)

Enjoy.

This is the hall where the Lincoln Inagural Ball took place - the tile is so beautiful!

Modern art hall ..... the sounds and images on the TV are from the 1960's and 1970's ... it's a young Korean artists interpretation of what it felt like to see our great big country from the interstate highway.

ommmmm. The Atrium - it's 20 degrees outside, but if you know where to go you can sit in this garden any time of year.

another view of the atrium

Snowshoeing the volcano!

We had Kristie come up to Washington so she could take pictures of our family snowshoeing on Mt Rainier.  We realized after we got back that there wasn’t a single picture of Kristie on our trip.  We had another fantastic day on the mountain even though the weather ranged from mostly poor to downright bad.  Even though the weather wasn’t great the mountain was quiet and peaceful with a few inches of new snow on top of a hard snowpack.  We ended up covering about 1.5 miles before we stopped to rest in a cove of trees and never got going again.  The kids had a ball playing in the snow for the hour we rested and then we headed back to the car and a little bit of sledding before it got dark.

We didn’t build this snowman but took a picture anyway.

Lucy spent most of the day wrapped up and being carried by her mom.  She did peek out for this picture though.

A group picture without Kristie.

The kids playing in the snow.

This picture is taken post snowshoe trip.  We found a snowsuit for Lucy and it was so cute that we had to try it on her.  This will enable her to get down and crawl around in the snow the next time we go!